Recognizing English words by Japanese speakers

Abstract

Japanese listeners are influence by word frequency and neighborhood density (Yoneyama, 2002) as in other languages such as English. Interestingly, non-native listeners are also affected by word frequency and neighborhood density when they recognize English (e.g., Bradlow and Pisoni, 1999; Imai et al., 2005). Based on the previous studies of neighborhood density by non-native listeners, Yoneyama (2006) investigated whether Japanese listeners learning English employ two types of lexical information (word frequency and neighborhood density) when they recognize English words, as in Imai et al. (2005). The results were different from the ones of Imai et al. (2005). Japanese listeners were sensitive to both probabilistic phonotactics and word frequency. A strong correlation between probabilistic phonotactics and neighborhood density still predict Japanese listeners can be influenced by neighborhood density in English word recognition. A critical difference between Yoneyama (2006) and Imai et al. (2005) is that they did not use the exact same materials, although Yoneyama (2005) selected the words as described in a conference paper of an earlier version of Imai et al. (2005). This study reports the results of the experiment in which the materials of Imai et al. (2005) were used.